March 7, 2009

My Wife the Amazing! Mistakes In Chinese and New Friends!

Well Heather has truly outdone herself this time. My birthday is coming up in a couple of months and she surprised me with an early present. She dropped the news on me last week that she was going to be sending me to Beijing for a few days with my brother… And NO KIDS! (Although I love them greatly) Heather knows that I love to go on adventures and that my brother will be leaving soon, so Jenny (my brother’s wife) and her planned on letting us go and hang out together without the family. It’s nice because it’s really cheap to fly within China (or at least it is now) so it will be a fun cheap trip. We will leave this Thursday and return on Sunday. We’re planning on seeing Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden Palace, The Great Wall, Bird’s Nest, Water Cube and maybe the Summer Palace. We will get to eat Western food the whole time, rumor has it there is even a TGIF’s there, so we are really excited. I will share pictures and stories when I return next Sunday (the 15th). THANKS BABY!

My grandparents just last week asked if I had made any mistakes with my language that were funny. I couldn’t recall any recent examples… But luckily for me I made two this week. The first one came when I was trying to tell my class and teacher about my friend (who is a guy). So as I’m talking I say my “boyfriend” which literally means, the man I’m dating and not, my friend who is a man, which is what I meant to say. Everyone got a good laugh at my expense as I described my “boyfriend”. I guess I made this mistake more than that this past week, because another teacher pulled me aside after school and corrected me on the same thing. The other mistake I made was in class as well. I went to the front of the class to write some Chinese characters on the board, which I’m terrible at. Well I didn’t do very well and as I started to walk back to my chair I tried to say “Wo hen hanzi”, which means “I hate Chinese characters”, as a joke (don’t worry my class knows that I’m joking as well). But instead I said “Wo hen haizi!”, which means “I hate children”. Needless to say I was pretty full off of shame burgers. At least my teachers and class get to have a good time laughing at me, as opposed to with me.

Lastly, I recently stopped talking about when we would meet new friends and what not, but Heather just made a couple of new friends that she’s excited about. And it happened in typical foreigner living in China fashion. As she was walking home a Chinese student stopped her to ask if she could practice her English with Heather. So today both of them (along with another student who wanted to practice English) all went out for lunch today and then stopped by our apartment on their way home. Heather is hoping to hang out more with them in the future. It’s a lot of fun meeting people here and building relationship, because Chinese people are so friendly and love to chat and hang out.